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Steam keeps on winning
(www.pcgamer.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Yep.
People fanboy over Steam endlessly without realizing that with time, it will turn to shit as well.
More competition is good, and maybe Epic is shit today but if their leadership changes then maybe it could actually significantly improve and surpass Steam.
But if it doesn't exist, then if Steam turns to shit then you're much more likely to just be stuck with shit.
Well, hold on. Why shouldnt we rely on pirates for preservation?
Valve is the only major PC game store that isnt public. Possibly the only PC store period, tho I dont know that for a fact for the smaller distributors. The private nature is why they currently operate as the best option for users, and the odds of the other stores going private is basically zero. So when valve shifts winds, they will be the end of an era.
Do you expect us to be able to request or rely on public companies to ever do better for game preservation and user to user trade than a private company does? You already arent pleased with valves stance, and there is no indication anyone will ever do better than them.
Who else would ever do better? Pirates are the best option.
Ok, but thats still also not about steam. Steam is a store, but they dont make much product. Game devs do that.
Game devs are the ones no longer making physical copies of their games. We should be pushing for the producers of games to be offering these.
Preservation is a joke. Sure, for super old games sold on cartridges it works. But for anything around.. 1998 to 2010 or so? Forget it.
Even when you owned the original PC CDs with the box, the game updates are no longer available (Developer might not even exist anymore, site is shutdown). And if you get the wrong DRM like SecuROM you can't start your game at all. Valid CD key or not (I tried it with Sacred 2, couldn't get it to run due to the DRM servers being gone. Support from the shop I bought it years ago just gave me a Steam key afterwards, lol). And of course even if you get things to run, the online servers are no longer available, so that limits it to singleplayer games mostly.
Looking back at all the games I bought right now Steam is doing the best job when it comes to actually keep them running. GOG is a good second place. Hell, my PC doesn't even have a DVD drive anymore, it's simply not necessary.
Having played on PC for the last ~27 years I really don't understand the nostalgia. PC gaming back then was a major hassle between physical media, manual game patching (version 1.01a to 1.01b to 1.02 to 1.1 to ..) and shitty DRM that barely worked. We can only hope Steam isn't going down the gutter, but for now they rake in tons of cash and it's a privately held company so it should be fine.
Well, physical media breaks, discs get scratched and you might no longer find the updates.
If you want to preserve your games nowadays your best option is buying from GOG and backing up your installers (it's DRM free and with no launcher). But it's a massive hassle compared to just using Steam and having auto updates. The GOG launcher that does updates for you exists, but it's a bit meh.
Not totally true, it's allowed to bequeath your account to someone through your will. At least for your Steam account. Of course you have to take care to do that before you die..
Valve isn't going broke anytime soon, they get around a 30% cut of every game sold and on top of that they also get a cut from all the steam market transactions. Valve is a privately owned company, which means no shareholders who want constant growth for any price, so for a company worth around 7.7 billion USD in 2022 I'm really not afraid Steam will go away anytime soon.
And even if Steam has to shut down, Gaben at least made the promise to give you downloads for all your purchased games. You can decide how much that's worth.
Ah, it's unfortunately not in the contract. They do it (See for example this answer where another family member got the account after their little brother died), but it looks like it's not a guarantee.
As for the big red button at Valve, I can only find snippets of information. The only "official" one: https://imgur.com/4sa1Ln6 Most information is just from interviews or private messages, claiming there is an inner senior circle at Valve and they do have a contingency plan.
They actually have terms that cover that. You can't sell or transfer accounts, and upon the death of the owner of each account, the account will be closed and licenses to games revoked. So yes, effectively, they will have accounts with a general "time limit" for existing, although they're still coming up on the first time they might invoke that, at being a 20 year old service. The oldest people who have bought games on Steam are probably in their 50's and so they may be facing it soon. As the user base ages, you might see more "end of life" account options. You know, so you can make sure all those anime porn games disappear and your grandkids won't be dealing with that after you're dead.
How does that work with the family share games option in the Steam client?
If they're playing a shared game does it just disappear on them all of a sudden?